Rethinking features: Features as numbers, heads as vectors.

Tommi Buder-Gröndahl, Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, & Phoevos Panagiotidis. 2025.

It is a ubiquitous assumption in contemporary generative linguistics that syntax is feature-driven. Yet, there is no consensus on what features themselves actually consist in. Without a proper analysis of its backbone, syntactic theory is bound to remain underdeveloped. This programmatic article provides, for the first time, (i) a set of concrete criteria for when a syntactic phenomenon warrants a feature-based explanation, along with (ii) an explicitly defined format for both features and syntactic heads. Against prior strongly anti-lexicalist proposals, we reject discarding features outright or reducing them to mere markers of formal difference between syntactic objects. While initially appealing, this begs the question against the main motivation of features: many restrictions on the order and distribution between syntactic objects are resistant to syntax-independent explanation. That said, we align with critics of feature-driven syntax in seeking to reduce their format to the minimum in complexity. To this end, we propose that features amount to natural numbers as defined by the Peano axioms. This directly yields both syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations via succession and (non-)identity relations. Functional heads – as feature bundles – can subsequently be analyzed as vectors, components of which play dedicated roles for enforcing feature-selection in the construction of extended projections with dedicated syntactic domains, as established in prior work. We cover how this framework can be applied to key syntactic explananda: categorization, the distinction between roots and functional heads, the order between functional heads, and the division of extended projections into domains. We further discuss its ramifications for second-order features such as the interpreted-uninterpreted distinction. Overall, our novel approach aims to establish a solid formal foundation for empirically well-established syntactic concepts while clarifying their computational status within the human language faculty.

Rethinking features: Features as numbers, heads as vectors. Continua 2(2): 65–133.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59236/Continua2.2/Buder-Grondahl-etal